Why does football waste £209m on such chancers?

As the squeeze bites and penury
beckons and even the Governor of the Bank of England is talking of
apocalypse, one group of dedicated public servants has found shelter
from the storm.

Two years ago, football agents made
£70.7 million from the clubs of the Premier League. Look it as
£70,700,000 to convey the staggering immensity of the sum.

Last year they had to make do with a
mere £67.1m but the resourceful rascals knew they could do better. And
so they did. This year they trousered £71.8m. That’s £71,800,000.

Big spenders: City have - unsurprisingly - become the top-flight's biggest spenders on agents in the past 12 months

And precious few people made a fuss
about it. Sure, one or two eyebrows were raised, since it is rather a
lot of money. But nobody called it an obscenity, nobody demanded a root
and branch investigation of how these unimaginable costs were incurred
and how they could possibly be justified.

Instead, there were small shrugs and helpless grins. It was treated as if it were regrettably inevitable, like death and taxes.

The extraordinary total of
£209,600,000 has gone out of the game in the past three years. A
towering mountain of money is now swilling around the bank accounts of
various spivs and chancers, leeches and parasites. This, remember, is
money which football has generated, yet will never enjoy.

If you wish to know how football
could use that improbable sum, then consider St George’s Park, the FA’s
National Football Centre currently under construction at Burton upon
Trent.

When completed, the 350-acre site
will be the training base for all the England teams, from Under-16s to
the full national side. With its 12 superb training pitches and
state-of-the-art facilities for coaching, player development, medicine
and sports science, it will be crucial to the future health of the
English game.

Money well spent? Fernando Torres is taking his time to justify his £50m price tag

The FA agonised for years over
funding such an ambitious project, but, with the help of the Umbro
sports company, they finally took the brave plunge. The investment will
eventually touch £100m, or less than half the sums which Premier League
clubs have paid out to agents these past three years. In two paragraphs,
you may see the scale of the abuse.

And was it necessary? Would the
transfer market have seized up without their predatory presence? Would
the game have suffered grievous damage, even mild inconvenience, if
these looters had not been on hand to prise out their percentages? Of
course not. And therein lies the real scandal.

Every Premier League club employs a
network of scouts, people who are adept at identifying young talent. The
idea that their work is in any sense inferior to the manipulations of
sleazy opportunists, motivated by profit and percentages, is frankly
insulting.

Equally, every Premier League club
employs a chief executive, selected for his or her commercial expertise.
These are people who could negotiate the average player contract in
half-an-hour on the back of an envelope. And yet they pay agents
hundreds of thousands, occasionally millions, to negotiate against them!
It is more than odd, it is genuinely disturbing.

If players wish to be represented, as
is their right, then they should pay the appropriate rate for that
representation. This is what happens in just about every profession in
the land. And if that bill is flagrantly excessive — even when the
contract is awash with noughts — then they should argue it down or
refuse to pay. The notion that clubs should always foot the bill is
unfair and absurd.

And yet the clubs condone the injustice without a murmur. Manchester City paid agents the sum of £9.7m, an offensive amount even for an owner with a bottomless purse. And Liverpool, who once set standards of conduct for the English game, meekly handed over £7m. While Tottenham, who have not swum in these shark-infested waters for many a season, coughed up an astonishing £7.6m.

Incidentally, the dearest season ticket
at Spurs costs £1,800. If you really believe there is no correlation
between that sum and the £7.6m lavished on agents, then may Santa Claus
be kind to you this Christmas tide.

For we know what drives this insanity. Our senior clubs exist in a climate of fear. Aware that agents have no loyalty, they are enticed into an auction of available talent. Their business instincts may tell them that the proposed transaction is economic madness but the manager is nagging, the fans are clamouring and the media is mocking their lack of ‘ambition’. And so they pay the ludicrous price.

The Premier League could squash it overnight with a few strokes of the pen. But the status quo is cosy, the clubs are uncomplaining and the revenues are comforting. They have never been natural leaders and never prized anything except profit. Likewise the Football Association.

Although they are more aware of their duty to the game, they are unwilling to incommode the leading clubs, reluctant to give a moral lead or set an ethical tone.

The Minister for Sport is evidently concerned but does precisely nothing and, as for the Secretary of State, I doubt that he is even aware of the existence of agents.

And so the people who could change the tone and the law stand indolently by, while the voracious scufflers pocket their percentages. It is both distressful and disgusting, a wonderful game in hock to charlatans.

Statistically speaking, this is getting tedious

Leading the way: Davies

A football manager was recently discussing statistics. He sees them as a coaching tool. He says it is useful to know how many yards a player has run, how much energy he has expended and so forth. And his point is well taken.

But soon after, I heard a radio presenter announce that a certain player was ‘racking up the assists’. It set me wondering.

What is an ‘assist’? Is it a goalscoring pass? Or the run which makes that pass possible? Or the tackle which makes the ball available? Or could it be the goalkeeper’s 80-yard punt?

Until yesterday morning, I thought it the most meaningless term. Then I learned that Kevin Davies, of Bolton, was leading the Premier League with120 ‘flick-ons’. Second was Peter Crouch, of Stoke (100), Emile Heskey, of Aston Villa, had 61, while Steve Morison, of Norwich, was languishing on 58. Some flick-on work to be done there, I fancy.

It was glorious gibberish but then the whole ‘stats’ phenomenon has become a tedious affectation, a means of conveying bogus authority to the lads in the pub. The trend deserves ridicule and resistance. But I fear wemay be too late.

England’s personality crisis clearly to blame

Wrong again: Courtney Lawes

Courtney Lawes was banned for two games for ‘recklessly striking’ an opponent at the Rugby World Cup. He, therefore, made only a limited contribution to England’s stirring efforts. No matter. He knows precisely what went wrong. ‘We lacked personality,’ he says. ‘Everyone felt they couldn’t

really be themselves. It reflected on the whole tour, and it affected us.’

It is the most intriguing explanation so far. Certainly it will confound those who sense that personalities such as the cerebral Chris Ashton, the self-effacing James Haskell and that model of responsibility called Manu Tuilagi found it all too easy to ‘be themselves’. I suspect the same may

have been true of Mike Tindall. Unfortunately, he was far too drunk to remember.

PS

The most cautious assessors of England’s European Championship draw said it could be much worse. The most optimistic were over the moon.

A path was plotted for England’s triumphal progress: sail through the group stage, sweep aside Italy in the quarter–finals, swat the Germans in the semis

(since we always do so well against that lot), then on to a final with Spain. After that, it’s the open–top bus and knighthoods all round. So that’s the schedule. Now what could go wrong?